Modern Wisdom - #122 - Buster Benson - How To Argue With Someone

Episode Date: November 25, 2019

Buster Benson is an entrepreneur & writer. How do we have a productive disagreement with another person? The art of conversing with someone to create a useful outcome is not simple. Ego, biases, reputation and much more get in the way of an optimal environment when we oppose someone's point of view. Today we learn the steps we can all take toward arguing more productively and effectively. Extra Stuff: Follow Buster on Twitter - https://twitter.com/buster Buy The Art Of Productive Disagreement - https://amzn.to/2Qodd7O Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, yes, hello, humans of podcastland. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is Buster Benson and his most recent book, Why Are We Yelling, the Art of Productive Disagreement, is kind of the beginning of a little lineage, I think, of books about how we have productive conversations with each other. I know that Scott Adams most recent loser-think book is kind of similar, just helping people to figure out how their minds work and how to communicate with other people and how to remove their biases and stuff like that. It's a really interesting topic. I think that a lot of this desire for people to have better conversations stems from the fact that we don't indulge ourselves in these

deep, meaningful chats. If I was to give you a single piece of advice, it would be to try and sit down with a friend for 30 minutes to an hour, at least once per week, and just have a discussion, leave your phone outside of the room, and just talk about anything, anything which is meaningful to you are interesting to them, learn to ask questions and hopefully the framework that Busta gives us today will help you to mediate things that you don't agree on and also to find some common ground with new things that you do. So yeah, if you enjoy it send it to a friend who can't argue for shit, please welcome Buster Benson. You ready to go? Ready? Lovely. Well, what if I'm not ready? Maybe we should have an argument about it. We can indeed. And we're going to today. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I am joined by

Busta Benson. Busta, welcome to the show. Thank you. So glad to be here. As you might have heard, we've been practicing our arguments ready for you to tune in today, but we are talking about the art of productive disagreement today. Yes. Or are we? Maybe we talk about something else, maybe I argue with you and we talk about something else. I'm open for whatever you got. I love having a good disagreement. Part of the most interesting part of research for this book was basically approaching disagreements in all parts of my lives. I can tell you that that has led to all kinds of just like weird side effects of its own. So I like going down those rabbit holes and seeing where they end up. But yeah, so if you have any like pressing like, you know, why is this thing so hard to talk about in public, we can talk about that. But yeah, I'm happy to also just

like give a quick summary of the book too if that's helpful. Amazing. Yeah, I think I've got, I've had some difficult discussions recently with people. Not difficult as in we were odds, but why is it difficult for us to have this discussion when it's not in as much of a collaborative environment? So, your new book, why are you yelling? Why did you write it and what's it about? Yes. I wrote it because I really needed to read this book. I think there's a lot of people that go out and write the book that they about what they know. My career has been in product development

and engineering and entrepreneurship and it was Amazon and Twitter and Slack and how do a couple of my own startups rent a bar for a while. I just all kinds of random things. And so I have a pretty personal relationship to arguing and disagreement that I'm, I think everybody has in their own way,

but it has been my job for a long time to facilitate sort of diverse groups of people that have different incentives, different goals, different skill levels, and helping them all come together and get something done. So that's sort of, I've been interested in it for a long time in a professional sense. And you know, I think part of what it came out of that was an acknowledgement that we're biased, we have blind spots, we don't see everything, we oftentimes fight for being right

instead of fighting for, you know, the truth. And we don't really have, as an argument, when our heart rate starts to spike, and our blood pressure starts to go up, our capacity to reason goes down, our interest in collaboration goes down, all these things. Basically, it's like, here's the time when you need all these skills,

and we're just gonna remove them all from you, very conveniently, and turn you back into like the fight or flight animal that you were billions of years ago or whatever. So my goal in writing this book was to take all of the knowledge in the world from all the experts because there are so many books about this about negotiation, about persuasion, about rationality, about using, you know there's just like there's a lot of stuff out there, about using, you know, there's just like, there's a lot of stuff out there and it's all very good. It's all right. Some of it's

really dense and some of it's really useful, but it's really hard to understand how that applies to our regular lives and how do we use that at the dinner table? How do we use that in one-on-one? How do we use that when we're finding with our spouse or, you know, a partner? How do we use that when we're one? We're just frustrated and angry and we have retired and when everything seems to be falling apart, all these things that seem to compromise us and so I just decided to take a deep dive and burst myself in all that stuff

and try to synthesize it because that's what I love to do. I like to synthesize things and make it practical. So that was the hope. I think that that's one of the most interesting things that we can do, especially as we get older and we can draw from multiple different bodies of knowledge, different subject areas. Intellectual hero of mine, Navarre Canter talks about the fact that he thinks joining these things is one of the greatest pleasures that there is in life. And I have to say that the same is true

for me. Interestingly, I spoke to Professor Paul Bloom from the University of Yale the other day and he recently wrote a book called Against Empathy, The Case for Rational Compassion. And it sounds like you're pushing towards rationality here. How unbiased can we make ourselves, how appropriate can we make our responses? Not necessarily. So I'm not pro-rationality or against it. I think that they are disciplines. In rationality is a discipline. Empathy is a discipline. Persuasion is a discipline.

We need to find the thing that's actually the most practical for us to use. And I think that any of these disciplines when taken to an extreme and applied, you know, they are very useful in a very constrained sort of sphere of sort of debate, right? Like if you wanna be, apply science to all of your arguments, you can do that, but you need a laboratory, you need research grants. If you wanna apply empathy to all of your disagreements,

you really need to be super healthy and emotionally like sort of thriving in a way that you could actually spend all this stuff. If you want to use rationality, you need to be talking to someone that also, you know, wants to play by that rule, right? You can't take rationality to a basketball court and play, you know, play basketball. You have to take it to rationalist and then you're sparring. But so I'm not playing for against them. I think there's a time and a place and a context for all these things.

But there is also this huge context of our everyday lives that, you know, where these things don't necessarily work. I understand. So we're talking about disagreement and the art of productive disagreement, specifically. At some point, did you define what you consider to be an argument or a disagreement?

Yes. I have an official definition, which is a disagreement is basically a difference between two perspectives that you find unacceptable. It could be, I think, A is better than B. You think B is better than A. If we're both cool with that, then no disagreement. If one of us thinks, I don't think it's okay for you to think that A is better than B, because B is definitely better than A, then we have disagreement. So it's really the unacceptable part. It's like, what is it that that's what sparks us into the need to prove someone right or the need to actually convert

with them about this? It comes from a good place, I think sometimes it's that we want, we think you, person A would benefit from my view, person B. If you had my view, your world would be better, and my world would be better, therefore I should get you to do it. Yeah, yeah. There's a selfish aspect to it and there's a selfless aspect to it. You know, this is how we learn about the world, right? We have to go out and talk to people that know things we don't know and we have to take their knowledge and link it up to what we do know. And that's inevitably going to cause differences of perspective. That's what we want. We want to go talk to people that know things we don't know. The process of integrating differences

is a skill that we have not been taught very well. We haven't been taught ways. We tend more to the anxiety we feel about like, okay, well, I've got this B is better than A thing in my head. I'm not ready to change that yet. That makes me uncomfortable. How can I mash their version of things into my head in a way that I can keep that, which oftentimes requires you to say, well, this person thinks A is better than B, but they're wrong. And so I'm going to put that, that's how I'm going to link it up. I'm going to put it into like, there are some people out there that are wrong, and then there's me.

And now it's coherent. Versus trying to actually decide like which one is the best, or is there a possibility that they're both, you know, it's okay for you to think that and me to think this and that's totally fine. I understand. So do you have a framework that people can follow that they can look at? Where do we start with the book? Yes, yes, yes. So this book is framed around eight things to try and meant to be things that, you know, are each in their own a big practice, a big way to pull together lots of experts and a lot of research and my own personal experiences and all that into something

that's like, hey, try this. Those eight things are, we don't have to cover them all, but the first one is watching how anxiety sparks in your head. So when you enter this agreement, try to notice what sparks at anxiety so that you can work backwards and think, okay, well, what was threatened? What was my value or my identity or my feeling or what felt threatened? And then you can use that to ask that person, like, did you mean to threaten this? Or did you say that for some other reason? Because most disagreements are often

times mistaken threats. They're not actually trying to threaten you. They're actually just ranting about something or they're trying to say something, but they're staying it in a very sloppy way. So that's one, and I have like tips around how to do that with like disagreement journaling and sort of private journaling and that kind of thing. Number two is to talk to your internal voices. So a lot of us think with our, you know, with voices in our head, we find ourselves sometimes like when we're when our blood pressure is up, we get angry and we tell people to shut up and we just try to stop the argument. And when we're with friends or we're at work, we're trying to be more professional, we use like logic, we're like, okay, well, what's the evidence for this? And how would you prove that? And let's see what happens.

And there's another one that when those two things don't work, it's like, oh, I just, I'm going to opt out. I'm going to avoid this conversation because there's no point in me talking to you. You're not going to listen to my reason. I don't want to be overbearing and or you're being overbearing to me. I'm just going to escape. I'm going to avoid everything. And I call that the voice of avoidance, which is the one that tends to have creeped into our lives the most. Turns out, there's so much in our lives

where we just decide to avoid the problem for some reason or another. Sometimes it's because you don't keep the piece. Sometimes it's because you think it's useless. And that's where the frustration comes in. We would want to be effective here. And we're choosing not to, that sort of annoys us. And so really giving names to these voices and starting to think about which ones

talk up when and when are they most applicable is one of those chapters. Chapter three is to develop honest bias. So really thinking about cognitive bias and how you can both see it in yourself and learn to see it see see how it creates problems around you and how to address the problems without having to necessarily diagnose everyone as biased because that's sort of what tends to happen is like we point it we go around trying to say your bias for this reason and your bias for this reason Meanwhile the things are just getting worse and worse I

I advocate for just like focus on the effects of bias and try to fix the damage that's being caused Because that's something that's tangible. It's you know, it's right in front of you. It's also the thing that's hurting the people And then over time you can sort of work backwards into you know what, what caused this, how do we prevent it from happening in the first place? So those are three that we start the book with, and then there's five more, but I won't go into them because I've been talking a long time. Hey, I'm absolutely, I'm absolutely loving it. I'm sure that the listeners will be as well. I think it will be once we've had a little chat about those. I think we definitely go through the remaining chapters because I don't want to I don't want to leave that open loop One of the one of the interesting things you said there. I certainly know that for myself is someone who

likes to Think about things and there's more of a cerebral way and you can sometimes break down a disagreement very Seribrily, you know just go back through thinking fast and slow and start just picking up Daniel Kahneman quotes and studies, throwing them at someone going like, no, like self-serving bias argument from authority, like you just say what you know I mean, and it's like, wait a second, like you totally bypass the actual purpose of using biases and working out where logical fallacies come from, which is to use them to progress the

argument forward, not to break the fourth wall of the argument and turn it into this weird sort of dick measuring competition about who knows the most biases. Right, right, right. Yeah, that's that's the danger I would try to avoid. And you know, full disclosure, like that's how that's where I started to, you know, as a PM at Twitter, we were always we were obsessed with the list of biases, and we would always try to pick them out and other people's arguments in the game.

What's PM? What product manager? What product? Okay. What briefly, what does that mean? Sorry. So, the team's, as a Twitter at the time, you have engineers, you have designers, you have a marketer. The product manager sort of works with them all

and comes up with a strategy, tries to identify which things are launch blockers, which things are bugs that need to be fixed first, whether or not the quality is high enough. You also have to wrangle with the execs and other teams to figure out how to get your resources, how to prioritize your projects and kind of things. So it's half of it's managing your team and figuring out

how do we all work together effectively, and half of it is managing your relationship to the rest of the company. That must be a very good breeding ground to develop negotiating skills, finding middle ground, compromise, ensuring that different stakeholders satisfied, etc. etc. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's definitely where I realized I had particular skills in there and also that I had a long way to go early on. And not everyone liked that role. So it was something that I was really drawn to. It was like, this is a meaty challenge.

I've never going to like master this to the extent that I was really drawn to. It was like, this is a media challenge. I've never gonna like master this to the extent that I get bored, right? So. And was it a similar role that Slack as well? Slack as well. Yep, and I had that at Amazon and most recently at Patreon. So it's a role that is pretty common here in the Bay Area. And it's also ambiguous.

You go to every single company that's slightly different. It's always a function of the culture and how that company works. That's a very interesting sample of some huge quickly growing companies for you to have developed these skills in. Yeah, it's definitely a crucible of excitement and torture and... But there's a fire alarm. Exactly. Yeah, I was at Amazon in 98, and it was just like books and music tabs were up, and the video tab was gonna come up soon, and the auctions was gonna come up. And that was right out of college.

I remember being like, wow, this is so, I feel like I'm in the middle of some weird, weird wild hurricane that's happening. Yeah, but yeah, I feel really lucky with being in the right place at the right time and a lot of ways. I really, really sounds like you have been. The listeners will know, but I'm a club promoter. So my job involves me mediating between the venue owner, which were not.

Our staff, there's about 500 of them that worked for us, 14 of them are the managers and then there's teams below them. The customers, the police, the council licensing author, Mark and you know, and we cross all different sectors of the business. So me and my business partner will do accounting, will do projections, will do the marketing, will do the copy, will do the HR, will do the hiring and firing, will do, literally everything. So, you know, juggling these particular skills is something that I enjoy. I like the challenge, which, you know, given your track record of companies that you've been at as well, I think that you must have that too. So we've had the first three. There was one, I think it was number

two that you mentioned about why you're talking to your internal voices, checking yourself on your internal voices. So there's an Eckhart tolle quote from the power of now, where he talks about conceding that, conceding that your point is wrong in an argument, is tantamount to the ego's destruction. And I often think about that when I'm having a discussion with someone and the listeners at home will know this as well. You have any discussion with someone and you think, right, this is irrefutable proof that what you're saying is wrong.

And they don't change their mind. They'll know, hang on a second, I've given you it. It's there. There's the thing. And rather than that, they dig their heels in further and they double down on that position Is that the sort of thing that you that you discovered in that? Absolutely absolutely that's you know, it's considered like backfire effect or the boomerang effect where You know, we don't in a particular context if the context is a battle or tug of war or you know, you're leaning back

You like and there's some of the pulls on their side of the rope you war or you're leaning back and if someone pulls on their side of the rope, you don't be like, oh cool, let's go over there. You're like, no, I'm not on the ball, my side of the rope harder. And that's just the game, right? That's the game you're playing in that context. It comes from fight or flight, it comes from our survival instinct to be like, hey, if I'm losing, that doesn't mean I surrender. That means I fight harder. And psychologically, it doesn't make sense. And if you just look at it from like, Oh, you know,

why am I not hearing the information and updating my mental model about reality, and instead choosing to fight back? Because oftentimes your cyber-evil is at stake, at least historically, you know, every place there really, you know, anyone who's been in a really heated argument knows that that feeling when it's really get going and you're almost, you're no longer listening, it's a game of tennis, it's a verbal game of tennis, you wait for that person to finish speaking or sometimes you don't and you just single-minded, you got the blinkers on like a horse in the race and you just going through it. Yeah, yeah, and we're all, yeah, you got the blinkers on, like a horse in the race, and you just going for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And we're all, yeah, it's like really hardwired in our brains, we really benefited a lot from it over time, because there's so many arguments that can't be resolved with reason. If something is like, hey, I want to have my house right here on this hill, and you want it too, but I'm bigger. I have more swords and soldiers on my side.

So I get to have my house here, or I want these goats. These are my goats. You don't resort to property rights. You don't take the court of law. You just settle it right there. And so this is how we settle most of things. If you look at a two year old and that has their favorite toy, they don't, you know, reason about why they should keep the toy,

they just yank it and start screaming. These are, they work in a pre-verbal sense even, even a pre-cognitive sense they work. So they're, they're deeply down there. But, you know, what, what gets us into that battle mode is interesting, because we don't have to operate in that battle mode all the time. And most of the time we're in that mode, we're not actually fighting for a survival. We're fighting for something stupid or something very abstract. And even if we're wrong, we're not going to die. We're not going to be kicked out.

We're not going to starve in the cold. So we should look at that. That's why it's start with, where does anxiety spark and sort of listen to the internal voices? Because that's the point where there's this crossroads, you'd be like, am I going to go down? I'm going to turn on my battle mode, or am I going to turn on my friend mode, or am I going to turn on some other mode? And you don't have to go into that mode. So there's a choice at the

beginning, I'm going to guess that turning on or not the and you don't have to go into that mode. So there's a choice at the beginning. I'm going to guess that turning on or not the anxiety mode forms the foundation for the other elements and the chapters. Is that kind of right? Yeah, I think I try to spend time helping build the instincts and the practices to avoid the mode altogether because most of the time you don't need it. If your health or your safety is in danger, yes, resort to the voice of power,

and just yank it and try to hold on to it, whatever it is. But most of the time we're arguing with each other right now, we don't need to do that. We actually benefit from learning something new. We actually benefit from building a relationship. We actually benefit from learning something new. We'd actually benefit from building a relationship. We'd actually benefit from enjoying the conversation and building new connections. So all these other things that we can get out of a conversation can be productive, can make it productive in a way that's way more rich, way more enjoyable, way more fulfilling than who's right. So there's a bunch of that around like what are the other fruits of disagreement that we can focus on that turns out are like way more interesting and fun.

Yeah, the conversation I had with Professor Paul Bloom from the University of Yale, we've finished talking about why we think that the podcasting platform is so enjoyed and seen such growth at the moment. And it's a cliche to say, it's the fastest growing platform on earth after Twitch TV. And yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. But is that just because of AirPods or because Joe Rogan's a boss or whatever, whatever? But I think one of the main things is that it's one of the few places where you can have 2 plus 2 equaling 5 with regards to a conversation.

You know, I don't want the best podcasters, some bad podcasters do this, but I don't want to come into this conversation with you. I don't have an agenda for me to come out looking like the cooler guy, right? And you know, that's not your agenda. I think so. Yeah. What we want, what we want, you know, you know, I think you're pretty cool as it is living in the Bay Area So I mean the northeast of England, I mean Winterfell

But what we're trying to do is we're trying to have a conversation It's one of the few places the last bastion of where conversations aim to make two plus two equaling five Where it's like you you know some stuff, and I might know some stuff. And then together we create and we're like, oh, wow, both of us have come to a new conclusion. And the weird thing about it that I think is important is that we know that we're being held to account by an audience that's going to be rigorous at checking us on our bullshit. Because if it was just a conversation between the two of us, you might be able to lie more or bend the truth. I might be able to, I could tell you that I was like a ex-professional

football player or whatever, but I can't do that because I know that someone out there's going to go, that's bullshit, you can't say that. So you're actually held to this incredibly high level of intellectual rigor and honesty and dignity and virtue and integrity and all that stuff. So it is, you know, I suppose what are your thoughts on these long conversations and stuff like that? That's being a breeding ground for productive disagreement. Absolutely. In fact, even through my own experience, I've been on a few podcasts now and every single podcast host I meet is so intuitively understands these points. Because you're on a daily or weekly cadence,

doing them, right? And you know, you know that, you know, asking good questions is important. You know that enticing people to sort of fill in their own arguments for something, show that share their own perspective and share their story is important to the conversation. And you have the time and the context

and the circumstances to allow space, if you're not looking for the sound bites, you're not looking for the zingers necessarily. So as far as I'm concerned, like, yeah, the book could have just been like, be a podcast host. And it's fine. We all just need our own podcasts, and we all just need to be on a podcast because everything about it, I agree, is just like,

it's conducive to longer. Maybe this is why they're happening right now when we need this kind of thing. Why they're growing so fast is because this is the antidote to the breaking news and the headlines and the rants and all that takes all that stuff. So, yeah, it is, you know, it's one of those things that I'm hearing from so many different angles at the moment that long form conversation is something which is lacking. We need to allow people time to think out loud and voice their thoughts with nuance and subtlety and error

without jumping on them and saying it to this and saying it to that. And, you know, I mean, I asked Paul Bloom essentially, why is it unmodeled to be racist the other day? That's a very difficult question to ask someone without them going like looking at you, like you're a Holocaust denier or something. I was like, no, no, no, no, I'm really fascinated.

What is the evolution? And he gives you time. He gives you time to go through it and he questions himself and the audience get taken on that journey. So yeah, you know, everyone is listening. I've said it a million times. I think that it is a good tool to use to sit down with someone that you know well for about half an hour once a week put your phones outside of the room and just talk about anything talk about something

You see in the news don't have anything else on just have a conversation because for me I get so fired up knowing that I get to speak to someone like Your cell for all brain markers or James Cleo whoever it might be right yeah And if you don't have that outlet you don't realize how much you're missing it Yeah, I'm I'm being swayed. I was originally for this book and I make a podcast and it seemed like so much work and so hard. And I know that it is a lot of work. But I see the benefits in like just the people that are drawn to it and do the work, you know, you're all very open-minded, gracious. You can see both sides. You're oftentimes like not polarized extremely on one side or the other, you can have a perspective that's large enough to hold, you know, invite guests that disagree and have conversations

that are difficult, like all these things are exactly what is set in the book and we may not all be able to be podcast hosts, but we are all people that have dinner with people and we're all people that go and walks with each other. We're all people that have conversations and write letters and all these other things that we can do. So yeah, I think it's great. And definitely you know, reconsidering my choice to not have one. Good. Good. I would definitely have a subscriber at least. You'd have one. So we've got with three chapters in what we are to next. Number four, what we what's what we work on. So number four is to speak for yourself. And this is sort of, you can always bring this back to the other ones to each one sort of builds on the, on the past ones.

But speaking for yourself, I found, especially online, is an easy guard rail to help keep conversations on track. When you start speaking for other people or imagining what, you know, how often do you say like, or do you hear people say, I can't understand why you would believe this or why you would do that. Well, you must be an idiot or you must be a racist or you must be a terrible person. There was a question, there was a question like, I can't understand something, but you don't ask it, right? All you do is you take your, your uncharitable stereotype of that person and you plant it into their head and you say, okay Well, you must have this terrible

projection that I have and therefore I can judge you and Understood I think I understand you, but I really only understand my stereotype and so if you ask people to speak only for themselves And they are trying to talk about something that they can't talk about from their own perspective. You're forced to go find someone that can go and do that for you. So find the person that can speak for themselves about the thing you want to understand, and so use that person to give you information instead of your own imagination to do that. So that leads into the next one, which is sort of paired with it,

which is like asking questions that spark surprising answers. So once you have that person there, like how do you, you don't just say like, you know, are you a terrible person? You know, speak for yourself. Try to convince me that you're not a terrible person. Those are terrible questions. You can ask questions that are much more open

and be like, you know, how do you form this belief? Do you even have this belief? How would you articulate your position to me? How are you misunderstood by people like me? How have your beliefs been useful in your life? Who do you look up to that has this quality? Just try to like, start to see the world through their words. And again, you know, using the fact that they come from a different life as a source of information and have curiosity about it. So ask really big, open questions. Wow.

Yeah. That little batch of questions that you've suggested there would elicit, you know, hundreds of hours of interesting conversations between people. Yeah. And even people that you hate. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people that I disagree with that I think, you know, I want to know, in fact, the people that you agree with more likely have similar motivations to you because you've already selected for one thing that's in common between the two of you. But as if you don't even have that thing in common, you're like, oh, wow, you must have

a really different world view. Yeah, yeah, it's really quick to see that, you know, to see that if you're asked the right question, you're like, oh, yeah, my, you know, I grew up here with these circumstances, with these, you know, this environment, and you're like, oh, wow, tell me more, because I don't know anything about that. Right. So I'm coaching a company out in Germany, and one of the particular guys that I'm working with at the moment, he was asking about how to be a better conversation list. He's quite

forthcoming. He's got a lot to say and he's clever and he's quick, but he knows that he greats on people. He knows that he can come across a little bit abrasive and he asked me for some sort of heuristic rule to use. And I was like, I want you to ask one question for every statement that you make when you have a conversation with one of the guys in your office. That's all. And even you can put what you want them to do

into your question. So you can say, okay, what do you think is a solution to this or how would you go about doing this? Or can you tell me why you think that? You know, and if you realize that, it not only does it help you to understand their point of view, and if you can ensure that you let him go of your ego and that you haven't got your battle mode on, and that you're not pulling too hard and do the things that we've discussed beforehand, and you're prepared to be sort of moved by the tide of the conversation. You can just sway from left to right, however it goes.

Again, you two plus two equals five in that conversation. Absolutely. Yeah, it's a skill. And again, I don't think people have been intentionally practicing this or being taught the skill, but the actual skill is not, you don't have to go and get your PhD and asking questions. You can actually just put, you know, right down five questions, put it in your pocket, and next time you go out, you know, and talk to someone, just like review it really quickly before you go in and be like, okay, I'm going to ask those questions. And then ask them, and then see where it goes. And it's self-reinforcing because once you start doing that, you realize how enjoyable it is to hear people talk about something that you weren't expected them

to talk about and to hear someone's own words to describe something. And so I like this one because it is like one of the first, most obvious reinforcing loops where you get instant creditification from a good question. You really do. I think certainly before doing this podcast, I'm an only child, and that meant that I had a very, very single-minded, solitary, selfish world view, which I'd probably still do.

And my friend, my friends are probably usually used to loving that. But it's a lot better since doing the podcast, because I have a genuine curiosity at what other people say. And I can no longer turn that off. So someone will get kicked out at the front of one of our club nights, and I'll be stood on on the door and this person will be shouting and screaming about why the door staff have kicked them out and I'll be asking them like, oh, so tell

me about what you do for work and I'm fucking off me. I want to get back in. I'm very interested in your backstory, please. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a big podcast series right there. Oh, God. Standing on the front door. Honestly, if I had one of those body cams on that the police were it would be it would be savage red Halloween last night in Newcastle and like wait, there's nothing better than seeing a guy dressed up as a ghostbuster fight a guy dressed up as a power ranger and the doorstep right to split them up and me being like excuse me, gentlemen. Can you tell me about where the moral virtue that's starting this situation? Chris go back, go back to you.

You're from different universes. I mean, how are they going to resolve anything? I don't know. They're from different universes. That's really correct. But yeah, the asking questions thing, super easy, heuristic, moving on. Number six, what we got. Okay.

So number six is building arguments together. So once, so this is another thing that I like to practice. Well, we got. Okay. So number six is building arguments together. So once, so this is another thing that I like to practice. And then, you know, I think you have to get good questions first, but building arguments together is basically like, let's just put aside my position for a while and let's really work on making your argument or your side of the position as strong as possible. And I can help you by both seeing, by seeing it from the outside as well, and you can help, from seeing it from the inside,

we can look for the answers to my questions together. We can look for, I can look at the evidence that you have as sort of help you explain it in language that I can hear better. All these things where you're now, rather than trying to tear apart their argument, you're trying to build it up because in an ideal world,

a disagreement would be something that you can learn from, and you can only learn from the best version of the argument. So that means you need to find the people that can best represent the argument and help them make it stronger. And this is a collaborative exercise. And you could just do this with almost anything. There's a best argument for even the most wrong positions.

And you can make the best argument for flatter. You can make the best argument for the world being on top of the stack of turtles. I mean, but by doing that, you're like, suddenly you're back into your creative mode. You're back into your like, OK, well, let's make this work. And you're doing it with somebody that has a lot to contribute. Because our enemies and our opponents actually

are the best at spotting our own blind spots and we're the best at spotting theirs and if we're actually working together There's a huge amount of benefit from using that knowledge of each other to make each other stronger Ultimately you might build up the argument. We're like, okay, well, I still don't believe the earth is flat but you know, I had a lot of fun doing that. And maybe during the process, they might be like, okay, well, and I had an experience where I talked to a globalist and they didn't try to hurt me or tell me I'm an idiot. I opened the door to them asking you questions about your argument or how you got to your side

because I gave you some of my time. They might eventually want to give it back. Yeah, so I'm thinking of two examples here, which you might be familiar with both. I think it is Charlie Munger, who says that he refuses to have a position on anything, unless he can state the other sides better than they can. Right, right, exactly.

That's an amazing heuristic. And then you might have seen the Pangbern philosophy discussion between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. And they started. They tried to do this. They did a they did what's called steel money. Is that right? Yeah, steel money.

Can you explain what steel money in argument is? Steel Manning is is is a version of this, which is like, I'm going to try to articulate the, you know, the best case of this argument. It doesn't necessarily require the other person to be involved, which I think is a crucial part of it, because they actually have a lot more of the information than you do. But yeah, it's basically saying, hey, if I don't think that it's moral to not vaccinate your kids. I can create the steel man argument of that of the other person's side by trying to use evidence and it's good of faith, you know, notion is possible. So like imagine someone like this and this and this and in that case, you know, I can see why, you know, they don't

have time to go give their vaccinations and that's why I don't do it. Or they live in Nigeria, there's no access to clinics, you know, whatever it happens to be, but taking everything on as good a faith as possible. Sometimes it's also called the principle of charity, just helping them. I think the crucial thing that they all sort of triangulate on is that we're usually in the mode of trying to tear people's arguments down. And that makes us not see the strengths. When you steal men, you sort of do the opposite. You look for the strengths and you look to make them stronger

and you look to try to imagine, because when we're arguing on behalf of ourselves, that's what we're doing. We're imagining it in this best light. We're not imagining it as far as... So it helps you with that empathy a bit. Yeah, I agree. And again, to come back to the asking questions part, a lot of the guys that work for us,

you can imagine there's a million micro decisions that need to get made about club nights. Who's working this week? What are the hostess outfits? Should we do confetti or should we do bubbles or should we do whatever? And everyone has a different point of view. And a lot of the time, I've noticed that the guys that work, they're maybe 18, 19, up to 21, 22. And a lot of the guys like to make statements about things as fact, but then they're never actually prepared to look at what the other side is saying and understand that. And then

another thing I wonder whether you've come across this, probably will have done, people are a lot more prepared in a disagreement to say why another thing is wrong than to offer a solution. Right. Yeah, I mean, this is always the case. I call this like arguing at the gate. So for, I mean, take any issue, we're often just trying to point out the flaws of the other side. We're not talking about what we would do if we were allowed to do with a thing that we're trying to do, right? Like, there's an example today of like, you know, with the Facebook ad policy. I don't know if you follow that or not, but they're trying to say like, you know, Facebook should ban political ads that are blatantly lying about stuff. And, you know, there's a good case for it. And, you know, there's a lot of, you know, heat around this right now. But no one's talking about what that policy should

be. Like, how would we censor political ads in a productive way? There are plenty of countries that do. And some of them are tyrannical countries. So we don't, we know that it's not just enough to censor ads, but we also have to create a good policy. So you can leave the gates, say imagine that we resolved this agreement somehow. What would we do with that victory? How would we actually be,

how would we execute on the answer? And it's surprising how little we actually think about that. I think that's certainly something that I see arguing at the gate. Is that what you called it? Yeah, yeah, that's arguing at the gate. That's just all that Twitter is to me. I don't know whether it's a result of the character limit that a lot of the time you are restricted to just put in like this is my point, this is the hardest hitting bit of it, which is usually a criticism of your point. Yeah, we default, we default to that, don't we? Because recently Twitter said that they're banning all political ads. Is this a second order effect, this Facebook pressure, a second order effect, do you think of the Twitter thing?

I think they're both sort of swirling in that same same discussion. Facebook is more so because they're much bigger, but yeah Twitter and LinkedIn and Pinterest also recently came out saying that even before Twitter that they are going to not have any political ads, and it's applauded by a lot of the critics of Facebook, but it also opens up a whole other question of like, okay, well how will you draw the line? Where did you find it? Political ad, yeah. What if Donald Trump's undergone a body transformation and he wants to sell you is like six-week beach body program or something?

Right. Yeah. So like, we're moving into another gate. And we're now at the like, what counts as an issue, a political issue, and can I advertise about it? And it's going to be just as he did. It's a little bit more nuanced which I think is good but it's still going to be a hard one I think.

Yeah this the fact that people are so prepared and you know I am as well I you know there's inflammatory stuff that I see online and I get a visceral reaction and I want to reply or say that you're stupid or whatever. But a lot of things, everything is so complex. Everything's so, so difficult. The real world's incredibly messy, incredibly chaotic and it's increasingly we're just not having very good conversations about things. It doesn't really seem on the whole to be getting that much better. I'm aware that

I live in this wonderful podcast utopia where it's just me and some person that I've had a bit of a chat with over email chatting about something that fascinates us both. The vast majority of people is not that especially for the guys at the top of the tree, you know, like if you're someone who's real, real typical normal mainstream media, you've got your 30 seconds snippet sat in a panel with like five of the people who all disagree with you. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's hard. I mean, we weren't ever in this situation before where we had a giant audience and no context for who we are, what we, what group we're in, all kind of thing. So I think it's really it's sort of you know the we're in this learning phase of a new technology, new environment, and we're making all kinds of mistakes. We don't have the skills, but it is an opportunity to step back and first you know have a bit of sympathy for everyone that's sort of flailing and failing in this context because none of us are good at it

and give people a chance to develop as people and to learn from mistakes and to learn from each other. And I think, you know, having one in one conversations, is a lot easier than having one and two a million person conversations. And so we can build that skill up from smaller circles and smaller situations and build our confidence and create new cultural norms about

how to disagree. I think that's just part of the process we need to go through as a culture. Let's learn these skills starting from the very basics. And it's still very early in our evolution on terms of how do we exist online as humans? Very much so. Have you seen those political debates, I don't know whether they have them in the States, I know they have them in the UK, where the audience members have a button that shows at the bottom of the screen, I think it's called the worm, so you can imagine there's lines for each of the candidates moving across the screen like that.

And then they go up and down, and they say different things, and you can track. And it's like, oh, reds said something really bad or blues made red silly, so red looks worse and blah, blah. Have you seen those things? I have, yeah, they do it for debates. Yeah. And I've seen them also done in a town hall kind of situation.

Okay. There's a methodology around it. I don't think it's great because it turns conversation into a sport. It turns it into who could score points. You can get the zingers. You can make the other person look like a fool. It's definitely not about coming to a an agreement or seeing things at eye. Very, I just aerial isn't it doing it that way? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the intentions are good. I mean, there's a bunch of, you know, and

you know, perhaps in a court of law or when you're talking about policy and very specific problem spaces, it would work, but I think at a national level, political debates, it turns it into a football game. Yeah, I think again, another Sam Harris' and I think he was talking about when he either does debates or just generally panel shows, so this could be either adversarial or collaborative, and he was saying that a lot of the time, the person who comes out feeling like they were the best wasn't the person who was the most lucid or the person who articulated their argument the best or whatever it was, it's if you get one huge raucous laugh from the crowd, like if you've got the biggest laugh you want, right, which is bizarre because

you know, some some could be talking about some real contentious serious topics, like the reality of Islam in the West or the laws surrounding abortion or the concept of consciousness or whatever it is. And then someone makes a funny joke and he's like, oh, he won. You know what? I know, I mean, that because you're there to be entertained. So that's what you're there for, then the laugh will definitely give you the points. I mean, I call them zingers, where there's a whole science, I think, to zingers, where you're not actually talking to that person,

you're just trying to make them look foolish, you're mostly talking to your own side about, how can I be the best sort of soldier or the best, you know, black bearer of my side, and like, say things in such a way that just, you know, create bewilderment or confusion in the other side, So, a black bearer of my side and like, say things in such a way that just, you know, create bewilderment or confusion in the other side, or taunt them, or, you know, all these things where it's very social, but tied back to war behavior again, where, you know, the goal

is definitely not to get along. Yeah, it's that there's Andrew Doyle and Constantin Kissin who are two comedians, political comedians in the UK. I've spoken to them both recently, saw them at the Edinburgh Fringe, and both of them said the same thing about, I think they call it a flawed comedy, which is where the comedian doesn't necessarily say

something funny, they just say the thing that the audience agrees with the most. And then they get these big like, yes, yes. Yeah. And he was, it wasn't even funny. It wasn't, it wasn't funny. You just said something that you think, like you can't say that anymore. That's a classic one, you know? And it just, oh, anyone who thinks that free speech is being attacked is like, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. Orchard is like, who here is from New York, you know, it could be anything that's loyalty-based about like, you know, what is it, how can my tribe be heard right now and that will get the applause, right?

So, Paul Bloom the other day when I was talking to him, you may have heard of this particular experiment. So he said that you put people into a room and you get them all to flip a coin. So, like 100 people in a room, you get them to flip acoin, roughly 50 a heads, 50 a tails or whatever it might be. And then you put them on opposite side to the room and you got the tails people and you know, I was like, what do you think of heads? And they're like,

they're a bit sort of stupid, aren't they? They're just not as clever as us. And blah, blah, blah. And you're like, you have been selected by the most arbitrary random chance. It literally the most arbitrary random chance that you can get, and we're still drawn towards being tribal. Yeah, yeah. There's something emotionally rewarding about being part of a tribe, like we want to belong, and the way that we build status

within a tribe is by, you know, being a good member of it, which means protecting the tribe, projecting confidence, all these safety increasing traits that signal that our tribe is going to be okay. Even if we were on two sides of a cliff on the winter, and who knows why the bridge broke, but we were on two different sides, we want our side to survive the winter. And it makes sense if you just think about how many generations of our society have benefited from these preferences. If we ended up preferring, like, well, the other side probably did not blink it. So let's go give them our blankets, your trip's not going to survive to everybody. Yeah, I suppose as well, this probably highlights where the difficulty with subtlety and new

ones comes in as well, because if you're part of X tribe, they want you to swallow the ideology wholesale, and any give that you might not be singing from the same hymn sheet is actually, oh well, maybe, maybe buster, maybe, maybe doesn't belong in the other side. Yeah, yeah, maybe he's on the other side. And that's why, again Paul was talking about, for instance, someone who's very, very left-leaning but has a country views to do with abortion law, or someone who's very, very free speech, but, but has a country views to do with abortion law, or someone who's very, very free speech, but thinks that the internet needs to be police more heavily, or whatever it might be. And, you know, that, again, it's hard for everyone to try and

work out what their views are, and we need productive disagreement for you to help me understand what I think, and for me to help you understand what you think. So, right, we've got two chapters left, we got seven and eight. Yes, I want to say one more thing about that though, because lovely. There is so much to say about this tribal stuff. It's really the underpinning of all of our thoughts around disagreement, which is like, if you even just look back at birds, you know, birds can't, well, kick members out of their flock if they're caught stealing. If there are times when there's scarcity and one bird is eating all the food and they're

going out hunting, that bird will be exiled or ostracized from their tribe. This sense of like, you don't burn a stay in the group, you have to contribute. The worst punishment of any group is to be removed from the group. That's how we enforce all of our laws. It's like, if you don't follow the rules, we kick you out. And that works as long as in the past, you kick someone out and they probably end up dying, right? Because there's no other group that's going to take them in.

Now we kick people out and they're like, oh, hey, trouble maker, come over to our trouble tribe. We're going to help you become stronger and we have all these other weapons. We can, you know, and we're building this new, you know, argument that's going to, and we're going to go attack them next year, you know, in 10 years. And so the things that worked in our tribes, the past, like, you know, follow the rules or else, now in a world where everyone can find a community, no matter how fringe you are, and those fringe groups can become stronger and more angry at you. The feedback loop is now where you kick out, it's going to come back 10 times stronger in the future. So it's

just interesting dynamic that requires different instincts for us to manage. So anyway, the last two are sort of relevant. So one of them, the second to last one, is to cultivate neutral spaces. So spaces, so speaking of tribes where you don't have to always signal loyalty to the group. You don't always have to repeat the ideas of your authority figure.

You don't always have to even be productive in that group. But imagine a dinner table or something where anyone can bring an idea to the table. It could be a bad idea, it could be a good idea. That makes it neutral on terms of ideas. No one has to endorse the idea just by in order to talk about it. You can talk about it and be critical of it.

But it's welcome to the table. The second level of that is like, who's a lot in the room? Can anyone arrive in the room and present their ideas? Can we allow terrorists and Trump supporters to the room to tell us what's going on with them? The danger that we fear is that if we invite them to the room, they're going to come in and attack us, and we'll give them validation and all the stuff that you know that they came to do in bad faith but a truly neutral space would allow ideas to flow in and out good

in bad ones and allow people to flow in and out good in bad ones over time and some places can can cultivate this and others it becomes obvious that's not going ever happen. When other interests like revenue or costs are involved, you have to make choices about who can be there and who can't, and slowly over time that create systemic problems where people are undervalued and unhappy and marginalized, and whether it be the poorest people in the country or the most disenfranchised people in the country or the people that were previously in the ruling class but are now

being neglected. Everyone can feel outcast in that sense and unwelcome to the main group. There's all this talk about elites criticizing sort of like criticizing the common people, the common people are feeling displaced and they're not, they don't feel like it's a neutral space. So I think there's ways for us to work on that. And the last one is sort of a meta point. It's sort of a friend wrap up the whole thing, which is to rather than reject reality, reject that the world is like this, just like except that, you know, we have our problems. No one's, no one's perfect. We all have a, you know, a threat of between good and evil that goes between us. None of us can be perfectly one or the other. And we have to get into the fray regardless with people that are imperfect because we too are imperfect.

We don't need to use purity tests to like loyalty, but rather get it sort of working on the problems and start getting, making progress on that stuff and trying to just make sure that the whole world is perfect before you agree to go touch it. You don't have to wait for politics to be completely revamped to become a politician. You don't have to wait for the tech industry to be completely revamped to become a politician. You don't have to wait for, you know, the tech industry to be completely revamped. You don't have to wait for any industry to be fixed before you go in and try to help make it better. Yeah, so the first point that you've talked about there,

I suppose, with cancel culture and blockades around particular rallies or speeches, where they, one of my ex-podcast guests and a friend, Alex, who's at the University of Oxford, Steve Bannon was going to go and talk and some students had just blocked the street. They were like, no, no, you can't go, you can't go listen to him, we're not going to let anyone through to listen to him. Right.

And like, well, I mean, if his idea is that bad, you should be able to say at the Q and A at the end, just zing it the hell out of it, make him look a fool. But it's easier to just try and shut down the argument entirely. But bizarrely, it always, it almost always seems to work against people. You know, Ben Shapiro needs like 14 security guards within whenever he goes to go speak on campus and all this sort of stuff. And then yeah, with the, with your final point there, the fact that you need to accept the world as it is, I'm finding that mechanism appear in so many different areas of life at the moment. And there's a good piece of advice for anyone who's listening. If you are

continuing to come up against the same problem, you know that the world shouldn't be that way, but it continues to manifest. It's like, sorry, but the world isn't changing as fast as you wanted to. And you just, you just need to account for that. So we say all the time with the, with the managers or with some of the staff that worked for us or whatever it might be, we wish that they would be sufficiently autonomous with X task that we don't need to remind them. But after three weeks of them not doing it when we don't tell them, despite the fact that we scheduled for them to do it, you're like, this is just a thing where the world is the way it is.

And I'm going to have to send them a message on the morning that reminds them to do the X task, or the Y task or whatever it might be. And that that that appears to be rolling forward for everything, because we want the world to just happen, right? We want it to be this autonomous beast where we do the work once, and it just scales beautifully as this like evergreen utopia. Right. We have all these expectations. We don't want it to, you know, we have an expectation, and when it doesn't line up that makes us a little bit anxious. And so we can either decide like, okay, well, there's something broken over there.

I'm going to stay away from it, fix yourself, or we're going to help develop that and help them improve and get involved ourselves. But yeah, it is a hard instinct to overcome. It's very tempting to want to just hide the problems over there and say, hey, you got to hard instinct to overcome. It's very tempting to want to just hide the problems over there and say, hey, you got a problem and go fix it versus being the part of the solution. I suppose that manifests as one of the, as the third option that you spoke about earlier on, which is just the exit, the conversation thing as well, right? It's like, oh, well, look, this is just pointless.

I'm not even gonna bother engaging. You know know, well, I mean, if there's one sure-fi way of in making the certain that the world's not going to change, it's doing that. Exactly. So to wrap up, if you were to give the people that are listening your give the people that are listening your one favorite single heuristic or rule or piece of advice when it comes to having a productive disagreement. What would it be? Well, I mean, I think that the overall desire that I would sort of want to plant in people's heads is that we can get

better at this. Like we can become you know 1% 5% 10% better at disagreeing productively. And the only way we can do that is by practicing. So find the arguments out there that the disagreements that you're avoiding currently. And one that's within like the skill level, not too hard, not too easy. Especially at first, if you don't know where you are on that scale, practice it, and intentionally try to get better. This is going to the gym, right? How do we get along with each other? Is a skill we need to develop in ourselves? Because once we develop it in ourselves, we can feel it in ourselves. We can sort of remember what it's like. We can expect others to also have that.

And I think that's one of the only ways we can enact change in the world is to expect our leaders to be better, expect our, you know, the people above us to be better, but we can only expect that of them once we know what it is ourselves. And so, you know, I think we can start there to begin. And, you know, once you get hooked on it, I think, you'll find every conversation to be like a little adventure that, you know, it's going to, you don't know where it's going to go, it's going to be, it's going to be unpredictable because you're no longer just guard railing it or trying to shut it down. And it leads to really interesting things. It's highly rewarding.

So, I just, you know, I hope people turn this into a practice. It's, it's a, that's my goal. I like it. I think we've used a really lovely framework today. It's certainly something that I think will challenge a lot of people. They've got a lot of biases to overcome visceral responses to things, emotion, the ego, all the things that manifest themselves, verbal and pop inside of our brains. But yeah, like I say, go and have a conversation, have a long conversation with people, have a think about what we're spoken about. What about podcasts?

Do you talk to your own podcast? Honestly, I'm telling you. Well, the stupid thing now is that you can do an IG live, a dual IG live with someone else. I'm actually gonna start doing this for the podcast. I'm going to do just a weekly 15 minute chat with someone else. It's not as structured, not published on any of the platforms, but it'll just exist.

But anyone can do that. Everyone got some form of social media. And you're like, okay, so what was it? The person buster said, oh, I need the external account ability of someone else that's going That's going to be listening to hold me to like high level of rigor and blah blah. There you go That you know just press press a button press go live button and get one of your friends to join you You know that that might that might nourish the the particular

Thing and so why are we yelling the art of productive disagreement will be linked in the show notes below. And it's at Buster on Twitter. I mean, that's the advantage of being one of the first guys on Twitter, isn't it, when you get to get at Buster? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had at Instagram too, but then I accidentally clad the account. No way. You had at Instagram. Yeah, yeah.

You know, that's a little sloppy. You could have held them to search your ransom for that. Or just used it to shamelessly promote your own book. Exactly, yeah. I love it. If there are any other places, you mostly on Twitter, is that where it's best to find? I'm on Twitter. I have a blog at busterbenson.com.

I'm on Medium at Buster as well. So Twitter is really the best place to start. And I'm open, you know, e-at mentions will get replied. So, I just like to talk to people. Fantastic. Well, as I've said, everything that we've spoken about will be in the show notes below. Of course, why we yelling the out of productive disagreement

is linked, and as always, if you follow that link, you'll be supporting this podcast at no extra expense to yourself. If you enjoyed this episode, go follow Buster Online, Hasselim, got a great handle on Twitter, like, share, subscribe, you know all of that good stuff. But for now, thanks very much Buster, it's been awesome man. It's been great, thank you so much. of that